


I dream of you, and dawn is unkind

by lookoutlouie



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Angst, How Do I Tag, M/M, and to talk about how war sucks, i just wrote this to describe the scenery, yes they're in a relationship but its 1917 so. ya know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 06:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23346733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookoutlouie/pseuds/lookoutlouie
Summary: Schofield drifts on the river, alone.
Relationships: Tom Blake & William Schofield
Comments: 14
Kudos: 16





	I dream of you, and dawn is unkind

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song "When we were soldiers" by Trocadero. This is my first fic I'm posting lol so I hope it isn't trash :))))))))

Schofield is drifting in the river, clutching onto a buoyant branch. The sky is slowly lightening above him, the first hints of periwinkle and blue showing behind the trees that line the sides of his vision.

He wonders if he’s in a dream. It feels like one. Everything is fuzzy and blurred, and his fingertips are both numb and pierced with little pinpricks. His body pulses with a dull pain, ebbing and cresting as the currents carry him downstream. Schofield feels broken, like a thousand separate pieces, gently knocking against each other inside a barely holding shell of pale skin and an army jacket.

He looks up at the ever lightening sky and the trees. Cherry trees with little white flowers that shudder under the touch of the morning breeze.

The petals fall and something inside him wants to think of snowfall. A blanket of pristine white spread across an empty field, with little flakes floating lazily through the air. If he were younger, unblanketed by khaki and unadorned with dog tags, he would have thought of snowfall. If he were still Will, hair curling at the neck and able to trick himself into thinking he understood the world. But he doesn’t think of that.

Schofield thinks _ashes_ , dead embers cooling themselves on the surface of the river. He fucking wishes he could think of snowfall first, and hates himself for becoming what was expected of him.

The kind of man who doesn’t eat his bread and can’t sleep properly at night with his gun at his side and strangles a boy with wide eyes. He tries not to, but it’s so, so hard.

His hand slides down the driftwood, losing its purchase and dipping his head into the river. Schofield lets it. The water covers his ears, submerging the sound of a thin silence with the all encompassing sound of running water. His head is so heavy, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. Schofield thinks that should bother him, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t hurt, just feels like his skull weighs a million pounds and will drag the rest of his body down into the depths with it. _It would be nice_ , he thinks. Cooling water and no pain and just calm, and he wouldn’t have to think about fucking morality during wartime or death or killing, because the little pebbles and long whiskered catfish at the bottom of the river wouldn’t care about that. They would welcome him, and it would be so far down that orphaned French babies and hellfire and soldiers with knives could never reach him.

Schofield lets go of the branch. For a moment. Feels the calm embrace of the water on his chin, his forehead, his lips. 

Closes his eyes, the last image in his head of the cherry blossoms above him. And that’s all they were, cherry blossoms. Not snowfall or ashes or his lost youth or his lost friend. Good friend. Brother in arms, in trenches, in mud, in stolen glances and lingering touches. Their last touch, not nearly as soft or tender as Schofield would have wanted.

He pulls himself out of the water with a gasp. 

Blake.

He has to finish the mission. Not for himself, but for Blake. He was counting on Schofield, wherever he was, to succeed. Save his brother and sixteen hundred men. Blake had believed in the mission, and he had believed in Schofield.

Scofield knew that Blake believed in many things, things that Schofield didn’t. In a god, in the goodness and humanity of other people, and most of all, in a reason for everything. Blake believed there was a goddamn reason for this war, something honorable, not that some fucker shot an archduke and everything went to hell. And Blake believed in Scofield, with every inch of his stupid face and stupider smile. Schofield loved him for it.

The way Blake had looked—embarrassed, surprised, and still a bit cocky—when he had kissed Schofield for the first time will always be burned into his mind. Schofield’s chest aches, as everything finally sinks in. He will never see Blake again, never hold his hand or touch his face or crash their lips together. And that was that.

He has to write a letter to Blake's mother. Has to believe there was a reason, even though Schofield knows that there wasn’t. If there was, it was that war is hell and pulled no punches, spared no soul.

But sometimes, it is nice to lie and think that there was a reason. Nice to think that Blake died valiant, dying for a cause he believed in, entrusting Schofield to finish his holy task. Schofield must carry on the torch, because what good soldier wouldn’t? A good soldier cannot dishonor the memory of Lance Corporal Thomas Blake.

So Schofield will fight for him; for the boy erased by war, for the “what ifs”, for the unlived future.

Schofield lets go of the branch and begins to make his way out of the river. For Blake.

**Author's Note:**

> Well! I hope y'all liked that little vignette! Hopefully I'll write something about The Boys that has an actual plot.


End file.
